


An Informal Catalogue of Coincidences

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 18:30:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12776877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: Emmanuel, alone again in a kitchen, grounds himself.





	An Informal Catalogue of Coincidences

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this one a while ago and sat on it with no real intention of posting it until my good buddy Hauke got into Friends at the Table and wanted content. Hi! I'm here with a n o t h e r version of this missing scene. \o/

In the quiet centre of the world, Emmanuel works his patterns. A bench scrubbed down, ashes scraped from the tray beneath the oven. He always hangs the whisk just so, he realises—a strangely revelatory moment which pauses his hand, leaves it resting against the hook in question as though touching an idol of a god.

Here is the exact spot beside the counter where he places the bucket after mopping the floor. Perhaps if he is still here in ten years time—perhaps if the world is still here in ten years time—the floor will be grooved there. Water dripping in a cave leaves a dent in the stone. A bucket placed again and again on the same tile leaves its mark.

This is not what pattern magic looks like.

Pattern magic is—what? Take a guess. Pattern magic is a break in the ordinary rhythm of things, the careful realignment of the improbable into the certain via twenty carefully engineered coincidences.

Or just real ones, sometimes—because pattern magic is Lem King smoking a cigarette on a balcony and Emmanuel, who barely knows him, who is so awfully exasperated with him, filled with a sharp and unexpected longing at the sight. A painful perfection made up of a long line of mistakes, or misalignments, or coincidences—that a moment of eye contact happened at exactly this moment in a fight—that a man turned right instead of left—that the smell of smoke happened to combine with the smell of Lem’s body and the feeling of the air on their skin just _so_. And then he was gone, and the world fell—falls—

Now, here, in the Nacre that lives in Rosemerrow, Lem has left again. But he leaves these things behind:

A cup with a half-inch of cold tea in the bottom, and some crumbs on a plate beside it.

A dark patch of wood on the table where a little of the tea spilled as Lem made some unsteady longing motion.

A broken button fallen from a coat, found standing on its side between the floorboards in Emmanuel's bedroom.

A few curling hairs on a pillow.

A sense-memory, vivid and burning, of a hand curled gently around the back of Emmanuel's neck.

A kind of uncertainty.

A kind of certainty—

The kitchen is clean, now, except for the cup of tea and the plate. Emmanuel lingers over them—considers them. Sketches, in his mind, Lem sitting awkwardly on that stool. Small for an orc but so very big for a human, forever hunching just a bit in that way which people who are too tall for their surroundings tend to do. Far too big, here in this of all cities.

It was good of Lem to let him have this—no, not the moments, the sight of Lem's eyes drifting closed as he drank—not Lem under him in his lumpy bed—but this place, this thing that he's trying to do. If Lem had asked twice more, Emmanuel might have closed the door to the bakery and locked it from the outside, let dust settle on the counters and small creatures creep into the sacks of flour while the owners scrambled to replace him. Let the rest of the refugees take care of their own.

Travelled. Again.

But he would always have remembered that he'd given it all up; would have remembered the people he'd left behind. Bitterness under the love.

He prefers to remember this:

The quick rise and fall of Lem's chest and the flush of his face. The strangeness of Lem's tusks against Emmanuel's cheek, the press of one to the corner of his mouth as they kissed. Lem's laugh when Emmanuel called him an idiot, the shaken note to it, the way it fell into a long shuddering gasp.

He prefers to remember this:

Lem's hands on his back, tracing his muscles and bones. Emmanuel, this is a bad time to ask maybe, but how did you—?

Die?

Yeah.

To remember this:

The way Lem lingered over the place when Emmanuel showed it to him. Examined the careful mortician's work which hid it, almost, from sight. The quiet wonder, without fear. The frown, then, at the place where Lem’s own blade had cut him—only slight—only slight. Should it matter more? It should matter more. It doesn’t—matter.

Or it does, in another way altogether—matters because of the moment of stillness that settled in Emmanuel's mind as Lem studied that place where they met for the first time—a moment of true, certain belief that even though Lem was going to walk out of the door, they would meet again.

Do you still feel—? A gesture towards Emmanuel's lips, the quick press of Lem's thumb. A glance downwards.

When you kiss me?

Ah—um.

He laughed at that. Yes. Oh, yes.

And remember the way that Lem kissed him, again. Everything that led to, all those sharp brilliant touches, quiet and fumbling and Lem settling at last and arching and shivering tending to rush but allowing Emmanuel to force something slower, something with enough space to breathe, even if the breaths were sometimes a little harsh—and—

Emmanuel finds he has fastened, caught on the hook of this last memory—that his body is hot only thinking of Lem giving so willingly, opening so readily—that the teacup and the plate and the crumbs are just as they were—that he has come only as far as placing his hand upon the table, where Lem’s rested earlier. He sighs, a laughing sigh, a rueful one—oh, Emmanuel, what are you tangled in now—?

You know. The same thing as always. The thing that happens whenever you long for too many things at once—and Emmanuel _always_ longs.

Maybe pattern magic is this: the way Lem's absent, chaotic passage through the world lets him come through catastrophe after catastrophe. Maybe all of Lem's strange being, his oblivious curiosity and his awkward stammering, is pattern magic—in some way that even Lem himself doesn't know. But who can tell? Lem knows so much and so little, is a half-read book and a well-used blade, is a fast-running river that doesn’t know anything about waterfalls yet, let alone the first thing about the sea. Barely sees those bigger things, right? The world moves around him all the same. Pattern magic is a thing he does with a violin, he said, but other people do it with words or with paintings.

With food?

Why not.

So maybe one sort of pattern magic is a way you live—a disruptive life—a haphazard one. Maybe now Emmanuel is woven into Lem's odd unpattern.

Maybe that should worry him. It doesn't, of course—Lem's safety worries him, the Ordennans worry him—Rosemerrow worries him. But what's a little strangeness? The wreckage of Nacre has drifted out into a strange world already. Stars fall. Reality tilts.

It's good, isn't it, to feel that there's something that anchors the two of them—to each other—to existence—? To hold the idea and say to yourself, in the dark, under burning stars— _well, we’re going to meet again, so I’d better make sure I’m ready_.

He wipes the counter clean and puts the plate in the sink—drinks, absent-mindedly, that last bit of cold tea, and blinks in surprise at himself, and smiles.


End file.
